Sex is a topic at the root of many of our difficulties and tragedies on this planet.
A beautiful and essential natural phenomenon has been made problematic and often dangerous through its manipulation by patriarchal religious influence.
What does Christianity have to tell us about sex? The major figures of Christianity: a man tortured to death for speaking the truth as he saw it whose judicial murder somehow mystically ‘redeems’ us.
The other main figure (apart from the bossy and distant patriarchal God) is Mary. Like Jesus, a member of a subjugated people hence marked as powerless and defeated, and also a woman who was too ‘pure’ to conceive a child in the way children are conceived and who is silent.
Earlier this year a young woman brought up in the cult-like Pentecostal church told me how even today guilt is used to control people along with sexual frustration through their very strict ‘sexual morality’ (total abstinence outside marriage).
Take a deep breath! Get the odour of virgin priests and cruel preachers out of your lungs… and think instead of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love one of the avatars of the Mother Goddess, who is lover as well as mother…
In the behavioral universe created by the monotheistic, patriarchal religions sex is all about regulating access to women’s bodies. The human instincts for pleasure and to have children have been tied up with religious rules and power. Women are not anyone’s property but their own: so we need to rethink the family on the basis of liberty, solidarity, and companionship, not licenses and contracts.
